The plot details for Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins (or T4 if you're into the whole brevity thing) have been leaking like a torn artery all over the web today, and reading about it is like watching a horrendous car wreck happening in extreme slow motion. In fact, since Christian Bale is involved, it's like watching a Maserati crash into a Yugo. Check out our breakdown of the details after the jump, and begin humming a funeral dirge for this doomed relaunch of the Terminator series.

It's planned as a trilogy, which means if the first movie sucks, it'll kill the rest of them and leave you with a cliffhanger. Of course, if it performs even halfway decent at the box office, they'll rush into the next two with gonzo effects, more explosions, and zero storyline.

John Connor isn't the main character. In fact, it's not a Connor at all, it's a guy named Marcus who was someone taken out of the picture before "Judgement Day," and wakes up 15 years before the laser blasts and flying Hunter Killers that we see in at the beginning of Terminator 2. Apparently John Connor is around in this future, but plays a very minor role in the film. What this means is that you've got the fourth film in a series, in which John Connor is set up in each film to be the end-all, be-all salvation for all mankind, and he's not even in the movie. Neither is his kick-butt mom, Sarah Connor, who now has her own Fox TV series to deal with.

The T-600s that were talked about in T2 make an appearance. Those are the Terminators with rubber skin, which sounds a bit erotic to us. Can they try and explain why the T-800s all look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and speak with an Austrian accent? Probably not. Plus, can they explain while you have to be nude to time-travel, but there's no problem sending a fully-functional robot covered in human skin back through the ages? Just encase a nuclear bomb in human skin and send it back to Los Angeles when John Connor was a kid. He'd be a goner,

Marcus gets a butt-kicking female buddy named Blair in the first film, and she plays a pilot for the humans. So you've got Marcus and Blair fighting robots, basically. Which sounds like a bad Fox reality show that could actually become a reality if this strike keeps dragging on. While it's not clear exactly what she'll be doing, we imagine they're going to toss in a romance between Blair and Marcus. They'll hate each other at first, and then end up getting naked in a bunker together while bullets whiz by overhead.

John Connor's daddy Reese shows up in this film, and he and John are buddies. Can you imagine having a friend your age who is actually your dad? It might be fun for awhile, but it would sure put a damper on the "so what hot chicks have you banged?" discussion. Plus, not that we don't love Michael Biehn as an actor, but he's way too old to play Reese at that age now.

We find out that the robots have human brains in their metal heads. Now, this could ostensibly be cool, although we're at our wit's end trying to figure out how SkyNet, a sentient computer program created by the military, could possibly get a human brain into a robot body. Unless it gets a sympathetic and wacky mad scientist to start helping out, then it just couldn't work. Whoops, looks like we just spoiled the entire plot.

To recap everything, we've got another Terminator movie in the works, without any of the things that made the original two films so much fun. A killer robot sent back in time to killer the mother of the savior of the human race? Sign us up! However, when you start getting into that future this story just doesn't hold up. That is unless John Connor stumbles into a warehouse filled with hundreds of Schwarzenegger-model T-100s in storage. However, the way this thing sounds so far, it would be the only bright spot in an otherwise dismal movie. We have higher hopes for Fox's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
than this thing.